Harry nodded, for he wanted to think, but the sergeant rattled on—
“It’s always the way with your biggest puzzles, sir: the way to find them out is the simplest way—the way that’s so easy that you never even give it a thought if it occurs to you. Perhaps you remember that chap in the story, sir, as wanted to keep a certain dockyment out of the way of the foreign detectives—French police—over the water—secret police, I think they call themselves; not that there’s one of them who can hold a candle to our fellows. Spies, perhaps, would be the better name for them. Well, he knew that as soon as he was out, they’d search the place from top to bottom. Well, what does he do? Hide it in the most secret place he could think of? Not he; for places that he could think of as being the safest, perhaps they might think of too. He was too foxy, sir; and he just folds it up like a letter, sticks it in a dirty old envelope, and pops it into the card-rack over the chimney-piece,—plain, for all folk to see; and, as a matter of course, they never so much as look at it. That’s just been the case with the young squire here; he’s been stuck up in the card-rack over the chimney-piece, chock before my eyes, and I’ve been shutting ’em up close so as not to see him, when he’s been as good as asking me to look. There, sir! I haven’t patience with myself; and I’m going to ask to be put on the sooperannuation list, along with the pensioners as I call ’em. Mysterious disappearance! why, it wasn’t anything of the sort, sir. But here we are!”
The cab was checked as he spoke, and alighting before a great gloomy looking building, the sergeant led the way up a flight of stone steps, and into a hall, where a liveried porter saluted him with a nod.
“Here, bring us the book again, Tomkins,” said the sergeant; and the porter reached a large folio from a desk, and placed it before the sergeant upon a side-table.
“Here you are, sir,” said the sergeant, eagerly, as he turned back some leaves, till he came to one which bore the date of Lionel’s disappearance. “Now, look here!”
He pointed to an entry in the accident register; for they were in the entrance-hall of a large hospital.
“Look at that, sir,” said the sergeant again; “and tell me what you think of it.”
Harry Clayton bent over the book, and read—
“Brown, John, stableman, run over by a cab. Severe concussion of the brain.”
“Now, sir, what do you make of that?”